


Contextual Drift

by Azzandra



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Anachronic Order, M/M, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-Canon, and they're all different people, everyone sure has gotten snarky in their middle age, it's years down the line, though some things always stay the same
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22407469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: Felix and Dedue have never had the easiest relationship, but eventually it was bound to get complicated in interesting ways.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Dedue Molinaro
Comments: 15
Kudos: 77





	Contextual Drift

"I wonder where Felix has gotten to," Dimitri remarked.

It did not surprise Dedue that he should give voice to this thought. Dedue had seen it boil inside Dimitri all day, a low simmer of concern, constant yet held in check for the sake of Duke Fraldarius' pride. 

But now, in private, at the end of the day, Dimitri slumped into an armchair and wondered. Where did Felix go, when he was not allowed to train, but too stubborn for bed rest?

Dedue knew, because he had gone earlier to find out. 

He found Felix in the darkness of his office. There was not so much as a lamp turned on; by all evidence, it appeared Felix sat at his desk until sunset passed and did not bother to light the lamps. The only light was from the fireplace, and it did not reach behind the desk, where Felix sat.

"What do you want?" Felix asked when Dedue slipped inside the office.

"Nothing," Dedue replied. 

Still, he strode in, looking around the room. Firelight cast half the office in a warm orange glow, but moonlight poured through the window behind Felix's desk, casting the other half of the room in an ashen stillness. Felix's face was lost in darkness, but the shape of his jaw and the outline of his cheekbones were etched in cold light. Dedue could not see Felix's expression, but he could see the whites of his eyes following Dedue's progress through the room.

"Then why are you here?" Felix asked, leaning forward in his chair.

"Why are _you_ here?" Dedue retorted.

"This is my office!" 

"Is it?" Dedue clasped his hands behind his back, gave a searching look to his surroundings. "It is hard to tell in the dark."

Felix did not have a reply to that, but in the semi-obscurity, Dedue thought that he could see Felix bristle like an angry cat. 

It was easier, in some ways, to jar Felix out of a fit of sullenness than it was Dimitri. When Dimitri took jabs, he swallowed them down, one by one, deep inside until they festered. But Felix bucked like an angry bull when prodded. 

If anything gave Dedue pause, it was that he had no obligation towards Felix. They were both loyal to Dimitri, in their own very different ways, and they might have been allies for many years now, but they had never been friends even if they had recently, painstakingly, worked their way up to friendly.

But that was not an argument Dedue could make to himself, because no matter the sting of Felix's words, his actions revealed him more surely than anything.

And Felix had gotten injured repelling assassins come to kill Dimitri. 

Felix's motivations were alien to Dedue at times; hard to understand where love or loyalty or duty had twisted inside and turned affection into something thorned and biting. But actions, at least, Dedue could trust. A shield was a shield, even if it could speak and call itself a sword.

So, then, here Dedue was, for lack of anything better to do. Prodding.

And here Felix was, snorting as he sat back in his chair.

"Don't tell me you're concerned now--" Felix started.

"Why would I not be?" Dedue said. "You were injured in my stead."

"You weren't even there," Felix muttered, "and there's no way to know if you would've gotten injured at all."

True enough. They had both been in enough life or death fights to know how fickle luck was on a battlefield. A hasty move, a slip of the foot, and even the most skilled man could find himself losing even when the odds were on his side to begin with. But that did not change the fact that Dedue should have been there with Dimitri, protecting him.

Felix offered no reassurance, though likely he knew this was the way Dedue's thoughts turned. He was a man too anchored in the present to consider what-ifs. So Dedue bridged the distance instead, approaching the desk with steady steps. There was no chair before the desk, because Felix always wanted people to leave his office as quickly as possible, and not get to comfortable.

So Dedue lit the lamps around the room instead, one by one. It was silent, but for the heavy fall of Dedue's footsteps and the crackle of the fire. The shadows receded in chunks and swathes, until the light was even throughout the office.

The oily gleam of lamplight was less kind to Felix than that slice of moonlight through his window had been. Seen properly, Felix was all too human. His unbuttoned waistcoat revealed a rumpled shirt; dark circles around his eyes made them look sunken, and in the years after the war, as Felix took up his role as Duke Fraldarius, fine lines had begun appearing on his face: not quite wrinkles yet, not quite crow's feet, but the suggestion of deep furrows where his frowns would settle as time marched on.

He looked so tired, for all that his injury had forced him into an inactivity that he was not accustomed to. Perhaps that was what wore down on him more. The training yard had always been where Felix found his reprieve. Some men became friendlier when drunk. Felix became more amiable when he crossed swords with someone.

"What do you want, Dedue?" Felix asked.

Dedue could not entirely answer.

But yes, he had found Felix and his whereabouts. Later in the evening, when Dimitri wondered, Dedue would tell him: in his office. But that would not be the full truth.

* * *

There were many paths that Dedue had taken that might have led to him and Felix in his office that evening.

The weeks after the assassination attempt were like a nightmare: steeped in panic, everything went either too fast or too slow. 

In the immediate aftermath, Dimitri growled and threatened and paced like a raging animal outside the healing chamber where they had taken Felix. Outside the castle, parts of Fhirdiad were on fire, and suspiciously only those that would cause most chaos. At the same time, soldiers trampled through the street, seeking accomplices and managing only to rattle the population.

When Dedue finally managed to drag Dimitri away--to eat, to sleep, to his kingly duties if he refused the first two--it had been to the relief of the healers.

Felix emerged pale-faced and with his arm in a sling the next day, sharp and acerbic as always, but clearly stretched thin in the wake of his injuries. Dedue noticed when Felix finished giving the captain of the city guards a tongue-lashing and then began swaying on his feet as though he'd been left light-headed by so much speaking.

Dimitri, lost in incoherent rage at first, pulled himself together out of worry for Felix alone.

That assassins came for him, Dimitri could accept. That one of his oldest friends was hurt in the process was far less forgivable, and the only fortunate thing about the situation was that Felix survived.

Not that he seemed particularly glad about it over the following months, considering the perceived coddling he was subjected to as a result. Ingrid was grim; Sylvain had a dark glint in his eyes that made all his smiles seem like snarls. Dimitri, worst of all, swung between sweet concern and consuming anger.

Felix just wanted his life to return as it was before.

Dedue ran into him in one of the castle's training yards a couple of months after the attack. His arm was out of the sling, not because he did not need it anymore, but because the healers were not around to take exception to this. The sling hung empty around Felix's neck. And with his still-injured arm, Felix held a sword.

That was all he did; held it upright before him. Felix stood like a dancer holding position, and from his place in the sidelines, Dedue could not see the tremor in Felix's arm, but he knew it was there because of the way the tip of the sword shook. 

Dedue did not say a thing, because he knew it would not be listened to anyway. But Felix's posture grew tense, even in its stillness, and as his shoulders rose by fractions and relaxed again, Dedue thought he could see the steady ebb and swell of Felix's ire.

Finally, it broke, and Felix whirled around.

"What?" he barked.

Dedue, sitting on a step at the edge of the training yard, as well-behaved as he had ever been in a classroom, looked around, feigning that he did not know who Felix might be addressing. Felix strode towards him, sword still in his grip, but he was nothing but empty threat. He came to an abrupt stop right before Dedue.

"I was only considering," Dedue said, "that you may well enjoy taking up more duties as the King's advisor if you are not able to train anymore. You will certainly have the time."

"What are you talking about?" Felix snarled.

"It is what the healer said, was it not?" And Dedue gestured to Felix's sword. "If you begin training too early, you will permanently damage your arm and no longer be able to fight with it. When that happens, you will no doubt need other things to fill your time."

"When that happens," Felix said, eyes narrowed, "I'll learn to fight with my left."

Dedue made a non-committal sound, and reached into his coat pocket to retrieve a flask. He offered Felix the first sip.

"For what ails you," Dedue said.

Felix's eyes darted to the flask, and back to Dedue's face just as quickly. His face twisted in suspicion, and it might have prickled at Dedue the way a stranger's suspicion did not, except that Felix was ever a man straightforward in his antagonism.

"Is that medicine?" Felix ground out, almost resentfully.

Dedue did not answer. He continued to hold the flask out for Felix, and waited.

Felix, stuck between his desire to not have yet another person haranguing him about his well-being, and his stubbornness to not be a coward, finally accepted the flask with a grunt as thanks. He was already winding up for a complaint when he threw back his head and drank.

In the next split second, he was doubled over, cradling his injured arm as he coughed so he wouldn't jostle it too violently.

"That's not medicine," Felix wheezed out, shoving the flask back at Dedue.

"I did not say it was," Dedue replied, and took his own short sip from the flask, wincing as the alcohol burned down his throat. He'd made much the same mistake as Felix when he first drank the substance, and the old lady who'd offered it to him had cackled with such glee, that all of Duscur had probably heard her. 

Felix gurgled something that might have been uncomplimentary, but he turned and stomped off to place the training sword back in its rack. 

Dedue lingered at the training yard, watching as Felix dithered along the weapons rack. But whatever Felix had planned to do in the training yard, he abandoned, and left without a word, worming his arm back in its sling as he did.

* * *

Or, the fork in the road might have happened sooner:

A few weeks after the assassination attempt, Dimitri's rage mellowed into self-recrimination. It often did.

But it was overshadowed by ongoing concern for Felix, which seemed to anger the latter worse than he'd been angered by Dimitri since the end of the war. Dedue was not privy to the conversations they had in those days, save the incidental knowledge that they happened, and the one time he had heard Felix's raised voice shrill even through a closed door, denouncing Dimitri for a boar once again. This was a habit Felix had dropped years prior, making it all the stranger now that Felix was older, wiser, and less prone to vocalizing his anger in this way.

When Dimitri emerged through the door, red-faced and stricken, just the way he hung his head alone spoke of how his talk had gone over.

"Will you speak to Felix, Dedue?" Dimitri asked, and though he was loathe these days to make any requests of him, the situation had evidently gotten dire enough for desperate measures. "He should be resting but he will not listen to anyone telling him so."

"If he will not listen to his friends, I do not see how he will listen to me."

"You are his friend also," Dimitri stated with utmost confidence; perhaps he knew something of Felix that Dedue didn't. "And," Dimitri added with a self-deprecating smile, "you have impressive powers of persuasion over ailing men."

Dedue was flattered that Dimitri thought so, but that did not mean he knew how to perform miracles. Still, everyone else had tried already: Ingrid had lectured, Sylvain had cajoled, and Ashe had pleaded. Mercedes could only dedicate so much time to one patient--especially one as recalcitrant as Felix--and Annette could only take so much time away from her teaching post at the School of Sorcery. If Felix refused to listen to Dimitri, then there really was nobody left short of the Archbishop who could make an attempt.

And Dedue acquiesced to Dimitri's request to speak to Felix, but even as he did so, he still calculated in his head how long it would take for a messenger to reach Garreg Mach and for the Archbishop to reach Fhirdiad. Sadly, long enough to be impractical for the purpose of wrangling Felix.

So Dedue managed to corner Felix one afternoon--and corner really did seem to be the word for it, considering how adept Felix had become at always keeping a wall at his back. He'd only just met with some petitioners in one of the smaller council chambers, and Dedue crossed paths with them as they were leaving. He found Felix shuffling papers as he sat at the table.

His face was drawn, a bit pale. A few stray white hairs had appeared in Felix's dark locks over the past month, or perhaps it was simply that his pallor made them more obvious. Felix looked up from the papers with reflexive wariness.

Now in the same room together, Dedue was not sure what to say at all. He and Felix had fallen into an easier rapport over the years, but the both of them had spent so much time looking at Dimitri, that it seemed they had never truly looked at each other. Now they stood, gazes locked, just as uncertain as to what to say to one another.

Dedue cleared his throat.

"Shall I speak with the others on your behalf?" Dedue asked.

"What about?" Felix asked, blinking slowly. His edge of hostility edges into confusion instead.

"It seems counterproductive to harass a man during his convalescence," Dedue shrugged.

"They're not-- harassing me," Felix said, and frowned.

"Ah, I see."

"They're just concerned," Felix insisted.

"Are they now?" Dedue asked, his tone perfectly neutral.

"Ye--" Felix scowled. "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"That-- Whatever it is you're-- I don't need _you_ to tell me they're concerned," Felix said.

"I was not the one to say it, was I?" Dedue raised an eyebrow.

Felix fell into a seething silence. He collected his papers with brusque motions, and slapped them down in a pile, glaring at them as though they had been the ones to trouble him. His nostrils flared, but his anger was yet to boil over.

"I just want them to leave me alone," Felix said decisively.

"You almost died," Dedue pointed out.

"I almost died a lot of times. I got better."

"We are none of us young enough to recover so quickly from an injury anymore," Dedue said, with the voice of someone whose every scar and joint ached when the weather turned bad. "If you were more diligent about following the healers' instructions, perhaps nobody else would feel the need to pick up the slack for you."

He made it sound like a taunt, but maybe a taunt was precisely what Felix needed in this situation.

"Fuck you," Felix retorted, perfectly flat.

But he didn't argue, which was as much of a concession as Felix's pride allowed.

Dedue heard later that Felix had dumped a stack of papers in Dimitri's office and sneered at him to take over the petitions for the day if he was so much of a wet nurse. Dimitri, far from being insulted, was heartened by the rude gesture; he'd heard that Felix retired to his room for the rest of the day.

And Dimitri had smiled at Dedue, a strange glint in his eye.

* * *

Or maybe, if one were to guess the moment on which their relationship pivoted, it would be sometime even sooner. It could have been any of a million little opportunities.

It would be before Felix even got injured, when peace still seemed to have settled too deeply over Fodlan to be easily dislodged. 

Shoulder to shoulder at the edge of a room, watching royal audiences from a shadowed corner. Felix's arm nudged Dedue's side as a representative of a former Adrestian territory piled insincere flattery onto Dimitri, and without words, Dedue knew just what Felix meant. 

Across the table from one another at yet another tedious feast, a headache crawling up Dedue's temples at the enforced small talk, and he caught Felix's eye just as Felix hid a grimace in his wineglass--sympathy passed in a flash so quick, nobody would have even known it existed.

Tired together on a balcony, looking out into a restless night: torches in the courtyard, coaches disgorging diplomats, a wyvern's screech in the air.

"There's a saying about fish and guests," Felix muttered.

"About how they reek after three days?" Dedue guessed.

"No," Felix replied. "Something about cutting off the heads."

"...I think Duscur has a very different approach to guests," Dedue replied after a while.

And Felix actually laughed at that, in quiet snickers.

* * *

Or, not then, not yet, but afterwards:

Felix recovered, day by day, inch by inch. Not nearly as fast as he would have liked, but he was eventually given leave from the healers to go to the training yards.

And Dedue, who knew himself as a tempering influence, and used that as an excuse for satisfying his curiosity, joined Felix as well.

The sword held steady this time; no tremor, and no hesitation. Felix performed his drills with a stiffness he hadn't had before, but he recovered his grace halfway through, and performed the exercise buoyed by relief and enthusiasm both. Dedue watched: the spring sun was golden, but Felix's breath was still visible on the air this early in the year. 

And Felix emerged into himself like a blooming bud finally becoming a flower. 

He finished his drills with a pleased smile on his lips, a shine of sweat on his forehead. His eyes were alive when he looked towards Dedue.

"Spar with me," Felix demanded, looking beautiful in the springtime.

Dedue would refuse, of course, because Felix's exertions were already in excess of what the healers had meant to allow.

But if that was not when things changed, it was at the very least when Dedue knew things had changed for _him_.

* * *

"What do you want, Dedue?" Felix asked that evening in the office.

All tiredness seemed gone from Felix as he stood an arm's length from Dedue, taut as a whipcord, amber eyes as warm as the fire crackling. Had Dedue never looked closely enough to notice? Or had he simply always taken it as a given, that Felix had a formidable presence?

"I realized," Dedue said slowly, and swallowed before he continued, "that I may be the only one who has not inquired after your health."

Felix looked up at him, face blank with surprise. With his head tilted back, his hair fell in soft waves around his shoulders. He had taken to wearing it loose since his injury. Or maybe, like so much around them, his tastes had changed.

"The only one not to annoy me, you mean," Felix said with a soft snort. "Why bring it up? Are you going to play nursemaid, now that everyone else has stopped?"

"You have never required a nursemaid," Dedue said. "I simply..."

Not finding the precise words, Dedue raised a hand to Felix's shoulder and touched fingers to his hair, the soft luster of it fascinating. It was easier, suddenly, to look at Felix's hair--black as ink yet shot through with white--than to look into Felix's eyes. Easier to curl a lock around his finger, push it behind Felix's ear--

Trace a finger from the shell of his ear down the line of his jaw--

Felix's hand gripped tight into the front of Dedue's shirt.

Dedue stopped. He looked. He waited.

Felix breathed in, his lips parted, his eyes on Dedue's lips.

"Well?" Felix prompted.

But Dedue spent a moment too long teetering in indecision, interpreting signs, sifting through signals, and with an exasperated little huff, Felix tugged on Dedue's shirt and rose up on his tiptoes. 

The first kiss was feather-light, a brush of Felix's mouth against his as he couldn't--quite--reach. The second was a firmer press, then a longer one, and from that point, it served no purpose to count how many hurried kisses they exchanged between shaky breaths. Dedue's arms wrapped around Felix, and Felix's fingers sank into Dedue's hair, nails biting into his scalp in ways that make lightning shoot down his spine.

But that was the moment when the change became irrevocable: when they clung to each other in Felix's office, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed. It was a moment worth savoring for however long it lasted.


End file.
